The majority of B2B companies do marketing with just one purpose – to improve their lead generation. That’s totally understandable – every B2B company needs clients to survive and grow. And this is where marketing automation steps in the game. You can use this tool to enhance your lead generation efforts and, as a result, bring more leads to your company. Let’s see how.
Some experts believe that you need around eight touches with your prospect for them to book an initial meeting with your team or sign up for a free trial. This makes sense, as during this process, the prospect can decide whether they need your services. And they can gradually build trust in your company, e.g., by reading in-depth blog posts or signing up for your company’s newsletter.
What’s the role of marketing automation here? This tool starts working the minute a potential client visits your website. The whole rest happens almost 100% automatically, and here’s how.
Step 1: A prospect visits your website
The majority of your marketing efforts require your leads to visit your website, usually as early as possible. When that happens, marketing automation can help you track each lead and provide them with the information that’s tailored to their needs.
CONTENT AUTOMATION
Content automation is a very useful feature that allows you to alter the content on your website according to what a given visitor is interested in. For instance, if you run an educational company, you can show courses adjusted to a given person’s interests or profession. This way, an HR manager can see HR courses on your website first.
The same can be done with newsletters. A simple {contactInterests} variable can allow you to personalize your newsletters so that this HR manager will not receive articles and links about data science.
CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM
At this initial stage, marketing automation does one more thing – it gathers information about your visitors. That’s where our Customer Data Platform comes in handy. This tool tracks each user’s activity on your website and keeps record of it so that it can be used later in other marketing initiatives. CDP provides a fantastic foundation for further personalization of content, offers, and the whole communication with a given person. You know what they are interested in so that you can provide them with relevant information.
POP-UPS
We know, you’re not a fan. That’s totally understandable, but the truth is, this tool can be used in an effective manner! For instance, exit pop-ups with a link to your free lead magnet can be very helpful when it comes to building your email database.
Your pop-up could say something along the lines of:
“Hey, Mark! So sorry to see you go 🙁 But we have a parting gift! Get our free guide on how to design a marketing strategy for your software development agency. Just click here and get access to practical suggestions that will help you grow your business!”
Again, it’s all about value. You want to help Mark grow his business. And you’re willing to give some free knowledge away. If your guide is good, there is a chance Mark will come back for more, and that’s what you need.
Step 2: The communication starts
Ok, so we have a prospect who has just visited your website, and CDP captured their activity; what’s next? You can start meaningful communication with such a person and nurture them so that they reach out to your company. Here, you need to be careful and don’t make aggressive sales. Instead, show your prospects that they can trust you. You can do so by providing value and showing success stories of your company/tool. That’s how you warm up your leads. And keep in mind that you need several touches before a given person decides to book/buy with you.
MA SCENARIOS
What tools can you use at this point? Marketing automation scenarios are by far the most important arrows in your marketing quiver. With them, you can plan a whole communication flow with potential clients, just like in the screen below:
Our platform comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor, so that you can effortlessly map out customer communication flows and campaign scenarios tailored to your business objectives. And you can do so without the need to write a single line of code!
For instance, if you run a software company, you can design personalized email drip campaigns based on customer behavior, such as interactions with your website or engagement with previous email communications. This feature allows you to streamline your marketing efforts, nurture leads effectively, and ultimately enhance your B2B communication strategy by delivering targeted and relevant content at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
RESPONDING TO ABANDONED PROCESSES
And one more scenario – suppose your prospect started a specific process on your website but never finished it. It could be an unfinished order, a contact form that was never sent, or a sign-up form for your newsletter or a lead magnet.
With marketing automation, you can easily respond to those abandoned processes and encourage your leads to finish them or at least revisit your website.
Abandoned processes work very similarly to standard MA scenarios, but they are strictly focused on communication with people who have already started some activity on your website. Depending on the tools you use, communication can happen through email, WhatsApp, text messages, or even push notifications.
Step 3: Lead nurturing
So far, we’ve covered the first visit on your website and first communication with your prospects. The next step can take a bit longer, as it’s all about nurturing and warming up your leads. This can take some time but is surely worth it!
Lead nurturing is all about staying in touch with your prospects and showing them how working with you can make their lives or work better. At this point, companies use different communication tools, but in this post, we want to focus on the two most important ones.
EMAILS AND NEWSLETTERS
If you have a high-quality email base, email marketing can be a powerful lead-generation tool. Use our drag-and-drop editor along with hundreds of ready-made beautiful templates to create emails and newsletters that grab the attention of your prospects.
The key to email marketing’s effectiveness lies in providing value. People don’t want to read about how awesome your company is; they’re looking for information that can improve their lives or work. Focus on that and make your email communication exclusively about your prospects. Provide them with useful suggestions and ask meaningful questions (some of which should relate to your company’s offer, naturally). This way, you can encourage some of your prospects to reach out and become clients.
Of course, this process takes time, so it needs to be automated, and that’s why you need this feature. Sending every single email to every single prospect manually would take a lot of time, but you don’t have to do so. Use our feature to create automated emails of any type – from lead nurturing to user onboarding.
PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
We admit that they can be risky. That’s because push notifications have this intrusive nature. Your prospect is doing something on their phone/computer, and suddenly, they receive a notification. Sometimes, you have less than a second to grab your user’s attention before they hit the “delete” button. But if you do manage to grab their attention, push notifications can be very effective. How can you achieve such a result? By focusing on the prospect and their needs. Don’t use push notifications to tell the world how great your company is. Focus on your users and their needs. Take a look at this example of a client-focused push notification:
“Having trouble getting new clients? Get our free guide and never worry about new business again!”
It’s a very short and very specific message that’s all about the user/client and their needs. That’s what good push notifications are about!
Wrapping up
Lead generation can be a tricky and long game. That’s why we encourage you to automate as much of it as possible. In this post, we mentioned seven different tools you can use, but there’s more. Take a look at our website and see how we can help you automate lead generation.
If you want to give our platform a shot, we invite you to sign up for a free 30-day trial period!
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